Yugoslav Cinema Symposium

The roundtable discussion of the Yugoslav cinema symposium.

Professor Misha Nedeljkovich studied and worked as a director for many years in the Serbian capital of Belgrade (formerly part of Yugoslavia), where he saw the wars in Yugoslavia erupt right in front of him.

While he now teaches Balkan cinema at the University of Oklahoma, he said it took 10-15 years of distancing himself from the heartbreaking events in his homeland before he could actually study and enjoy films from the Balkans. He said he tries to show his students how elements of filmmaking reflect social, cultural, historical and geographical context of an area.

Nedeljkovich was part of the Yugoslav cinema symposium on April 25 in the Spencer Art Museum Auditorium. Three Yugoslavian short films and one feature were screened, followed by a roundtable discussion from Nedeljkovich and other experts on the region.

The main theme of the event focused on how Yugoslavia’s history influenced its cinema, as Yugoslavia evolved throughout the 20th century from a kingdom to a republic to a post-socialist republic and more. Eventually civil war broke it up into different countries in the early 1990s.

“Yugoslav film history has not often been encountered by Western scholars,” said moderator Greg DeCuir, who’s on the KU faculty of dramatic arts with a focus on Belgrade. “The reason is that these films quite often have not been subtitled, translated, and have not travelled out of the region very much.”

DeCuir said it’s a challenge to speak about a country that no longer exists and its forgotten national cinema, which he said has not been celebrated as it should.

The feature shown, “Last Waltz in Sarajevo,” details the birth of cinema and radical activism in the Balkans in the early 20th century. The film shows the area shortly before it became a country, and since it was produced during the Yugoslav wars of secession in 1990, coincidentally it became the final movie made in Yugoslavia. All of its elements were not recovered and completed until 2007.

“This film can be read as a love letter to a homeland that has forever been changed, and as an interesting rumination on war,” DeCuir said. “It’s meta-filmic life speaks so strongly to what war does, not just in terms of art but in terms of life.”

Since so many ethnic groups in the Balkans have been displaced and forced to live alongside ethnic groups they oppose, this political tension and inner suffering is a common theme in the region’s movies. Nedeljkovich said self-mutilation is commonly depicted in Balkan cinema to represent this.

“These characters struggle, and those people from the Balkans know it is because of his emotional pain, his unhappy life, political constraints and psychological ‘whatever,’” Nedeljkovich said. “The emotional pain is so incredibly strong, that the physical pain no longer exists. So this self-mutilation shows his pain is on the inside.”

Nedeljkovich said a misconception viewers may have about films from this region is classifying ethnically different actors based on their own prejudices.

“Try not to be judgmental in the beginning,” Nedeljkovich said. “Do not say: the Serbs are right here but wrong here…We have to disregard this. It’s a horribly difficult task. This is not a Hollywood story. It is not cowboy in white hat good, black hat cowboy bad, easy to follow.”

“There’s such a big mixture of ethnicities within the Balkan area,” said Vitaly Chernetsky, a Ukrainian professor in KU’s department of Slavic languages and literatures. “There is so so much diversity that it not only makes this region unique, but also difficult to fully understand and explore. The region has faced so much adversity, so much conflict, many ethnic rivalries and bigotry. These are all things depicted and illustrated in [its] cinema.”

The biggest hit in post-Yugoslav space in 2011 not only confronted this ethnic conflict but also brought together all the region’s national film industries to participate in producing it. The absurdist tragicomedy “The Parade” follows a group of gay activists in Belgrade trying to organize a pride parade, recruiting former warlords, gangsters and criminals of different Yugoslavian backgrounds to protect them from the attacks of right-wing skinheads.

“This film is a fascinating testimony to how these competing identities of division but old signification, how they work and also how they change,” Chernetsky said. “This is one of the potential hopeful signs of how you bring about a serious thinking about the cinematic narratives and national narratives of history as articulated through cinema, where you reveal and basically make the audience confront all this tense and explosive history.”

Croatian professor Aida Vidan from Harvard University responds to the question of defining Yugoslav cinema.

Vidan: “How can we say what is Croatian, what is Serbian, what is Bosnian cinema? I’d like to refer you to quite a famous article by Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” in which he says that it’s impossible actually to define any cinema in national terms. And I think that Yugoslav, or post-Yugoslav space is a perfect case, both in artistic terms but also in economic terms, in terms of the industry.”

Ukrainian KU professor Vitaly Chernetsky has a different perspective.

Chernetsky: “What unites the possible national cinema is actually the audience experience. So it’s not the production side, but it’s the consumption, the reception side that is hugely important in this respect. One of the ways – and I’m not trying to wiggle my way out of answering it – is actually to propose that what audiences, both domestically in the countries of former Yugoslavia and internationally, view as cinema that unites and is specific to this region, that perhaps would be considered Yugoslav cinema.”